The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts - including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides' and Sofia Coppola's screen adaptation, photography of Detroit's `abandoned spaces', and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output - to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production. Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in...